The proposed project will explore several inter-related issues concerning the effects of global social stereotypes on judgments of individual members of stereotyped groups. In general, the project focuses on the role stereotypes play in creating different standards against which members of stereotyped groups are judged. The key argument of this research is that stereotyped expectations about group members lead the perceiver to shift or adjust his or her standards of judgment depending on the target's social category. For example, since men are generally perceived to be more assertive than women, a perceiver may have different meanings in mind when he or she characterizes a man versus a woman as being assertive. This line of reasoning suggests that stereotypes may be operative in situations even when it appears that they are not (e.g., a man and a woman might both be labeled "rather assertive," but underlying this common labeling are very different, stereotype-consistent representations). Ten studies are proposed to test and extend the "shifting standards" model. These studies are specifically designed to: 1) examine whether the "shifting standards" phenomenon may account for several recent research findings which suggest that subjects ignore their stereotypes when judging individual members of groups, 2) develop a means of measuring the standards subjects bring into judgment situations, 3) examine more specifically the processes involved in the standard shift phenomenon, 4) examine an audience's ability to accurately "decode" the subjective judgments of others, and 5) extend this reasoning to work on self- in addition to other-judgments. More general goals of this project are to increase our understanding of the basic processes involved in social judgment, and to alert both researchers and lay people alike to the extent of humans' reliance on stereotypes in everyday life.